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The authors examine one special focus of Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs), namely environmental, social and governance (ESG) related investments. The authors document the performance of SPACs with and without ESG focus.

The authors collect data, from several sources, on 1,737 SPAC IPOs formed between 2003 and 2022. A SPAC's focus on ESG is classified based on declared focus in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and in post-merger annual reports. The authors examine operational and financial performance of SPACs with and without ESG focus.

In the study's sample, only 50% of SPACs that announced an intention to acquire an ESG target ended up consummating a merger with an ESG private firm. ESG SPACs exhibit worse operating performance than non-ESG SPACs. Furthermore, they experience 11.6% lower 1-year post-merger excess returns than their non-ESG counterparts.

The study provides an examination of ESG firms that came to market via mergers with SPACs, which is an alternative method to traditional initial public offerings (IPOs). The study also provides a comparison of both operational and stock performance of ESG and non-ESG SPACs.

Emerging market multinational companies have been vigorous in pursuing inorganic growth through cross-border acquisitions (CBAs). The fundamental studies till now have portrayed that rapid internationalization through CBAs tends to create value for these emerging market firms (EMFs) in the short term. However, there is an ambiguity about whether these firms endure better performance in the long term. The purpose of this study is to assess the long-term (ex-post) financial and operating performance of EMFs involved in overseas acquisitions before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world economy.

CBAs completed by Indian and Chinese companies constitute the sample of the study. The performance has been analysed during the pre-COVID period spanning 17 years from 2001 to 2017. A comprehensive set of 14 financial ratios has been used to represent change (improvement/decline) in enterprises’ post-acquisition operating performance; these ratios have been divided into four broad groups: profitability, efficiency, solvency and liquidity ratios.

The performance of Indian companies has deteriorated significantly after the acquisition. However, there has been no change (deterioration/improvement), subsequent to CBAs, in the profitability of Chinese firms.

The findings of the study support that firms from emerging economies exploit CBAs as a “springboard” to obtain strategic assets including intangible resources and brands rather than to achieve synergies through economies of scale and scope. Apparently, outbound acquisitions by emerging economy firms are not driven by cost-reduction or revenue-generation activities.

None of the studies, to the best knowledge of the authors, has carried out performance analysis using a comprehensive set of financial ratios. The comparative study of two emerging economies is another valuable addition to the existing literature. The study holds the potential to serve as the benchmark to assess the performance of CBAs executed after COVID-19.

This study aims to provide a meaningful comparison of airports’ performance and better understand the differences observed in the analysed airport performance by presenting a model to analyse the relationship between operational and financial performance and airport characteristics.

This study uses a quantitative analysis approach. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and entropy weight were utilised to analyse 17 airports in three Airports Council International regions: Asia, Europe and North America. Through operational and financial factors, these sample airports identified the most efficiently operated airports from 2016 to 2019.

Overall, Asian airports were superior in operational and financial efficiency. Unlike operating performance, the sample airport’s financial and total performance results show a similar trend. There were no noticeable changes in operational factors. Therefore, differences in financial variables for each airport may affect the total performance.

This study provides insightful implications for airport policymakers to establish a standardised information disclosure foundation for consistent analysis and encourage airports to provide this information.

The adoption of Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation (EBITDA) to debt ratio and EBITDA per passenger, which had previously been underutilised in the previous study as financial factors, demonstrated differences between airports for airport stakeholders. In addition, the study presented a model that facilitates producing more intuitive results using TOPSIS, which was relatively underutilised compared to other methodologies such as date envelopment analysis.

In this vein, this paper aims to provide empirical evidence on the following questions: Which expansion strategies offer better operational and economic performance? What effects does performance-related diversification have? How do other factors such as size, quality, service offered, location or seasonality interact with performance.

In this paper, the analysis of the effects of growth strategies and hotel attributes on performance is carried out with a sample of 255 hotels that operate internationally. Using panel data and quantile regression, this study evaluates the effect of expansion and diversification on the hotels’ performance.

From these findings, it appears that the equity strategy (own hotels) outperforms non-equity strategies (hotels under rental, franchise and management contract) at the operational level. However, the economic return of the property, both adjusted and unadjusted to risk, is lower under the property ownership strategy than under the franchise and management strategies because, in general, it requires a higher investment. Regarding diversification, the growth strategy based on related diversification in food and beverage services has a negative impact on performance, calling into question the synergies between the two businesses. However, an exception to this effect is seen among those hotels, mainly those in the Caribbean, that opt to provide all-inclusive services, since these hotels achieve better occupancy rates and more stable results.

This study has not taken into account the effect of hotel property revaluation on the performance of the ownership strategy, as there is no information on the historical average revaluation at the level of each individual hotel. This study has also been unable to include information regarding the level of competition and seasonality of sales.

This paper considers a wide number of factors that can influence the performance of hotels. Second, this is the only paper that studies the impact of growth strategies from the point of view of the hotel chain. Also, the sample considered uses data at the individual level on hotels and this research analyses not only operational performance but also economic performance.

The purpose of this study is to identify the characterizations of business process management (BPM) methodology in hotel industry through an aggregate processing of the core cyclesteps (CCCs) of the highly-cited BPM life-cycle models in the literature aiming to highlight the major issues of the current methodological approach of BPM in hotels when to put the notion of service process into practice.

The paper identifies and examines the most popular BPM life-cycles models in the literature and locates 15 life-cycles that are highly cited. The paper then focuses on applying the theory on nine listed hotel companies in Egypt using a questionnaire in the form of a semi-structured interview technique.

The CCSs of BPM life-cycle model applied in hotels revealed a gap between BPM theory and practice in this sector. Utilizing this model of BPM life-cycle, the paper focuses on describing several of the main problems or pitfalls found in the methodological approach of BPM in hotels, which brings the essence of the whole operation management problems.

In light of these findings, the paper discusses the practical implications and focuses on recommendations on how to properly improve the methodological approach of BPM in hotels in order to get better business results.

The paper bridges the gap between BPM theory and practice and suggests recommendations that will assist hotel companies to eliminate the problems of poor process management (PM). There are also future research recommendations to enhance the knowledge of BPM theory in the service sector.

This study investigates the relationship between working capital investment (WCI) and firm value for Indian manufacturing firms using excess net working capital (NWC) and Tobin's Q as a measure of WCI and firm value, respectively. The study also examines whether firms use the cash released from excess investment in working capital to make long-term investments.

The sample comprises 834 Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) listed Indian manufacturing firms whose data from April 2010 to March 2020 are analyzed using a fixed-effect panel regression analysis approach.

The empirical results show that excess NWC influences firm value negatively and significantly. However, the nature of the relationship becomes nonlinear upon dividing the sample into positive excess NWC and negative excess NWC. The findings from the study also reveal that firms redistribute cash freed from positive excess NWC for long-term investments to improve their value without impacting the corresponding risk.

Overall, the results suggest that firms with positive excess NWC can enhance their valuations by building adequate long-term investments from surplus WCI funds.

To the authors’ best knowledge, studies on this issue have primarily focused on developed economies. No study seems to have been done on this subject in the emerging South Asian economies. The present study is the first to bridge the research gap by investigating the relationship between excess WCI and firm value for manufacturing firms in India. Moreover, it examines whether a positive excess NWC reduction translates into corporate investments (CI).

Quality awards are widely considered symbols of successful quality management. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the effects of the China Quality Award (CQA) on firms' performance. The study further explores how the benefits due to CQA are affected by contextual factors.

Using the data of CQA winners from 2001 to 2016, the event study method is applied to analyze the abnormal performance of winners. Furthermore, multiple regression models are proposed to evaluate the effects of contextual factors on the relationship between the award and profitability.

The findings show that CQA has positive impacts on profitability and fixed asset efficiency but not on labor productivity. Besides, state-owned firms and firms with high innovation intensity obtain more profitability benefits than others.

This is the first study to explain the relationship between quality awards and firm performance from a theoretical perspective, providing new insights into the quality management and performance literature. Furthermore, this study deepens the understanding of the relationship between quality awards and performance and reveals new implications. Some of the contextual factors examined, such as innovation intensity, are considered for the first time in quality award research.

This article examines the relationship between the cash conversion cycle (CCC) and profitability in countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The authors used dynamic panel methodology to analyze a dataset consisting of 395 firms from nonfinancial sectors in the MENA countries from 2013 to 2018. The authors developed several models consisting of different measures of profitability, CCC and the components of CCC. The control variables were used in the models at different levels.

The results bring out a significantly positive relationship between the CCC and profitability. However, mixed results have been obtained for industry and country details. The quadratic model revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship and the presence of an optimal point of CCC. The robustness checks have confirmed the results of the main models.

The results of the study imply that corporate managers and policymakers ought to pay equal attention to the components of CCC when developing working capital policies and be aware of the optimal level of CCC.

This paper handles the endogeneity problem that is inherent in the relationship. It investigates and confirms the nonlinear characteristics of the relationship. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to use dynamic panel models to examine the CCC and its relationship with profitability in the MENA context.

Foreign subsidiaries incur substantial institutional conformity costs because they have to respond to host-country institutional pressures (Slangen & Hennart, 2008). The purpose of this paper is to study this type of cost from institutional and regulatory perspectives. The authors argue that these costs decrease when the host country adopts concepts of international regulations that multinationals may be familiar with due to their own home country regulation experience. This prior regulatory experience gives foreign subsidiaries an advantage of foreignness (AoF), which can offset their liability of foreignness (LoF).

This study compared the returns on assets of 35 domestic firms with those of foreign subsidiaries in the Brazilian energy industry between 2002 and 2021, using regression dynamic panel data.

The existence of a relationship between the international regulatory norm and the Brazilian regulator has transformed the LoF into an advantage of foreignness to compete with local energy firms. The results also suggest that the better the regulatory quality of the subsidiary’s country of origin, the better its performance in Brazil, as it can reduce compliance costs. Finally, the greater the psychic distance between Brazil and the foreign subsidiary’s home country, the worse its performance.

The research suggests that one of the keys to competitiveness in host countries is local regulatory ties. Prior international regulatory experience gives foreign subsidiaries an asset of foreignness (AoF). This result complements the current institutional and regulatory foreignness studies on emerging economies (Cuervo-Cazurra & Genc, 2008; Mallon et al., 2022) and the institutional asymmetry between home and host country (Mallon & Fainshmidt, 2017).

This research suggests that one of the keys to competitiveness in host countries is local regulatory ties. Prior international regulatory experience gives foreign subsidiaries an asset of foreignness (AoF). This result complements the current institutional and regulatory foreignness studies on emerging economies (Cuervo-Cazurra & Genc, 2008; Mallon et al., 2022) and the institutional asymmetry between home and host country (Mallon & Fainshmidt, 2017). The practical implication is that the relationship between conformity costs, capital budget calculation and strategic planning for internationalization will be related to the governance quality of the home country of multinationals. The social implication is that a country interested in attracting more direct foreign investment to areas that need foreign technology transfer and resources may consider adopting international regulatory standards.

The social implication is that a country interested in attracting more direct foreign investment to areas that need foreign technology transfer and resources may consider adopting international regulatory standards.

This research discuss firm and local regulator tie is one of core competitiveness in host countries (Yang and Meyer, 2020). This study also complements the current institutional and regulatory foreignness studies in emerging economy (Cuervo-Cazurra & Genc, 2008; Mallon et al., 2022). Second, prior regulatory experience of multinational enterprise in similar environment can affect its foreign affiliate performance (Perkins, 2014). Third, this study confirms current literature that argues that knowledge and ability to operate in an institutionalized country can be transferred from parent to affiliate. In the end, this study investigates whether AoF persists when host governments improve the governance of their industries.

This study aims to investigate the effect of income and asset diversification on earnings management using discretionary loan loss provisions (LLP) in banks, and the role of risk level in mediating this effect.

A sample of banks operating in Middle East and North Africa countries was used to test the mediation model of Baron and Kenny (1986) with different measures of diversification and risk.

The results show that bank income and asset diversification have unique and combined effects on earnings management. The results also support the idea that a risk-mediating effect contributes to explaining this relationship among banks. Specifically, bank diversification strategies positively affect LLP-based earnings management by increasing bank risk. This result is relevant for conventional banks. However, only a direct and positive effect of diversification strategies on LLP-based earnings management can be observed in Islamic banks, and the indirect effect is not supported.

This study extends previous research by examining the unique and combined effects of income and asset diversification strategies on earnings management in the banking sector. Specifically, it provides new evidence that diversification strategies increase LLP-based earnings management, both directly and indirectly, through bank risk.